In China Train Crash, Sina's Weibo Breaks News

One evening last weekend, two high speed trains collided off a bridge in Zhejiang province, China. Forty people died. Nearly 200 were injured. As has been the case in other parts of the world, the first people to report from the scene were the victims themselves. The microblogging sensation known as weibos broke the news.

"Our train bumped into something.Our carriage has fallen onto its side. Children are screaming . . . Come to help us please! Come fast!"

That was the words immediately posted on the weibo account of a the D301 train on July 23; the first in a string of similar microblogging messages sent over the Sina Corp (SINA) and Tencent Holdings microblogging sites that combined, have more users than Twitter has worldwide. Like the rest of the world who learned about Arab uprisings this past winter, or even an odd Tweet from a Pakistani witnessing the covert attack on Osama bin Laden's home, the microbloggers are beating Cristiane Amanpour and Matt Drudge to the punch.

The above post was from Yangjuan Quanyang's weibo account at 8:47 pm local time, according to China Daily. The train she was on had just crashed into bullet train D3115 outside the city of Wenzhou. She survived. In 10 hours, Yangjuan's plea was reposted 100,000 times, according to the paper. In the following week, there were 10 million messages about the crash on Sina's Weibo and 20 million on Tencent's QQ.com Weibo, the other major Chinese micro blog.

In the aftermath of the crash in eastern China, some 20 million micro-bloggers demonstrated their newsmaking prowess. Anyone who had a weibo account and received those messages would likely have turned on their local news to see what was going on beyond the short weibo message.

China Daily reported that comments were "highly emotional early on, and rumors abounded. But then some observers who communicate through micro blogs took on the mantle of the fourth estate and its tenet of monitoring the holders of power."

During the two-year history of micro blogs in China, bloggers have claimed other successes. In March, they pushed a city government to not to cut down 600 old trees, and organized help for earthquake victims in Japan. In July, they put the Red Cross Society of China and its financial operations under public scrutiny.